I am struggling with this one a bit.

I need to find a model of HP DL servers that will accept a full height PCI card and it needs to be as cheap as possible and be capable of running server 2003.

Rest of the spec is really unimportant, perhaps it should have 2 PSUs and mirrored disks but thats about it.

All the ones I look at take PCI-E or PCI-X, in the old days you could get riser cards and replace them with what you want, but cant see anything in the current range.

Help.

I'm not sure you will find anything in the DL range, is the ML range a possibilty? from memory you will find more flexibilty with this range.

Check out

ML310 G5

ML330 G6

ML370 G6

All take mirrored disks however the ML310 will only take a single PSU.

Edited 11 February, 201115 yr by matt@theforce

I have it sorted hopefully.

Having done some digging around, I found out the card we need to transfer from the old Dell box (nearly 10 years old) is a PCI2.1 compliant card. Looking at the specs for PCI-X, it seems that its backwards compatible with 2.1 cards, so we have spec'd a DL320 with the optional PCI-X riser card.

I have it sorted hopefully.

Having done some digging around, I found out the card we need to transfer from the old Dell box (nearly 10 years old) is a PCI2.1 compliant card. Looking at the specs for PCI-X, it seems that its backwards compatible with 2.1 cards, so we have spec'd a DL320 with the optional PCI-X riser card.

Yep, you're correct the PCI 2.1 32 bit card will work in the 64 bit PCI-X slot, it will just take up the first half of the slot rather than the full length that a 64-bit card would. I think some of our LSI logic SCSI cards are like this in our Proliant DL380 Boxes.

One thing to watch out for if you are planning to run Windows 2008 on the new box is that not all of the older PCI Cards have driver support in 2008, you would be surprised at what doesn't work (3C905 Network Cards), some Adaptec SCSI Cards. Worth checking if your old card has 2008 drivers first.

Your PCI 32 card will run fine in a PCI-X slot.

What is the full height PCI card though and would it be cheaper and more future proof to replace the card with one with PCIe and a server that has a spare slot?

its a dialogic card that has 3 analogue phone lines plugged in and handles incoming voice calls. you know the things that ask you to press 1 for this, 2 for that and so on. We'll be sticking with 2K3 as there are no 2K8 drivers for this card, and to upgrade the card costs around £3K.